Building Co-operation: A Business History of the Co-operative Group, 1863-2013

摘要

Even though numerous user-owned ventures arose earlier, the origin of the cooperative movement in Britain is generally set in 1844 when the Rochdale Pioneers established their consumer cooperative store (now a museum) in the east Lancashire town bearing the same name. Cooperation offered a third framework for economic development between the more stark alternatives of capitalism and Marxist collectivism. Cooperation was founded on distinctive philosophical principles of democratic control, open membership, religious and political neutrality, limited returns to share and debt holders, and the distribution of profits on the basis of purchases. The cooperative also supported fair dealing, product/service integrity, pacifism, and education and personal development. The key purpose of cooperation was to provide a distinctive basis for personal interaction through mutuality, rather than competition, which drove capitalism or the type of radical worker control advocated by Marxist proponents. Thus, the cooperative movement, which was nevertheless aligned to working class social, economic, and political objectives, sought to combine commercial viability with broad humanitarian aims. The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS; what became the Co-operative Group) played a practical, foundation-like role in supporting this comprehensive agenda by harnessing the purchasing power of individual cooperative retail societies.